Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Tensions Rise In Iraq’s Kirkuk Between Arabs, Kurds, And Turkmen

In the last two months, tensions within Kirkuk city and the province of Tamim have steadily increased. All three major groups, the Kurds, Arabs, and Turkmen have been complaining about the governorate’s security forces and representation on the provincial council. The Turkmen Front want their own security forces, which led to the Arabs calling for theirs, and then boycotting the council, while the Kurds have complained about the Arab presence in Tamim. All of the recent rhetoric shows that the governorate is as divided as ever.

The Kurds are playing right along with the other two groups. In mid-August, the Kurdish parties demanded that they get the same amount of members in the provincial security forces as the Arabs. A parliamentarian from the Kurdish Coalition claimed that the 12th Iraqi Army Division, which was stationed in Tamim, was upsetting the ethnosectarian balance because it was mostly made up of Arab soldiers. In October, the provincial police chief, General Jamal Tahir Bakr, who happens to be a Kurd, took it to another level when he claimed that 15,000 Arabs had moved into the governorate since 2003, and that they should all leave. He went on to say that they were “illegal settlers,” and a security threat because they collaborate with insurgents. He went as far as to threaten to arrest all of these “illegal” settlers. The Kurds have made similar claims in the past. They consider any Arab that moved to the province in the last several decades part of the Baath Party’s Arabization policy. They believe that this policy has been implicitly continued after the overthrow of Saddam. The Kurds ultimately want to annex Kirkuk and other regions of the province, and the Arabs are one of their main opponents. The Kurdish parties therefore, have been trying to change the demographics of the province since 2003, by moving Kurds back in, and trying to encourage the Arabs to leave. The demand for a larger share of the security forces, and threatening to arrest Arab settlers is all part of their plan to create facts on the ground that will ultimately strengthen their case to transfer Kirkuk to Kurdistan.

This recent set of demands and accusations are nothing new for Tamim. Every couple months, one major group complains that their opponents are snatching up power, and that they are losing out as a result. This latest rhetoric by the Turkmen, Arabs, and Kurds therefore is nothing new. It all shows that the new Iraq is still dealing with the old one. Saddam Hussein attempted to Arabize Kirkuk to strengthen the central government’s hold over the oil rich area. Since 2003, the Kurds have been trying to reverse this process, and annex it. This has severely threatened the Arabs and Turkmen who want to either make the governorate an autonomous area or keep it under central government control. All of this is the reason why the major groups in the province continue to verbally attack and accuse each other. None of this is likely to end any time soon as Baghdad is incapable of solving the major problems in the country right now, because the parties are more interested in maintaining their positions, and outmaneuvering their rivals. As a consequence, the status quo in Tamim will remain, and this back and forth will continue.

No comments:

TWITTER

About Me

Musings On Iraq was started in 2008 to explain the political, economic, security and cultural situation in Iraq via original articles and interviews. I have written for the Jamestown Foundation, Tom Ricks’ Best Defense at Foreign Policy and the Daily Beast, and was responsible for a chapter in the book Volatile Landscape: Iraq And Its Insurgent Movements. My work has been published in Iraq via AK News, Al-Mada, Sotaliraq, All Iraq News, and Ur News, and I have been interviewed by Rudaw English. I was interviewed on CCTV and TRT World News TV, and have appeared in CNN, the Christian Science Monitor, The National, Columbia Journalism Review, Mother Jones, PBS’ Frontline, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Institute for the Study of War, Radio Free Iraq, and others. I have also been cited in Iraq From war To A New Authoritarianism by Toby Dodge, Imagining the Nation Nationalism, Sectarianism and Socio-Political Conflict in Iraq by Harith al-Qarawee, ISIS Inside the Army of Terror by Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassahn, The Rise of the Islamic State by Patrick Cocburn, and others. If you wish to contact me personally my email is: motown67@aol.com